


Woke Up Like This

by louciferish



Series: YOI tumblr shorts [4]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Artists, First Meetings, Internet Famous, M/M, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-22
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-07-15 15:57:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16066460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/louciferish/pseuds/louciferish
Summary: “I saw a picture of you on Facebook,” Chris says. “They don’t know its you yet, but it is. You’ve gone viral.”





	Woke Up Like This

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AntaresPromise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AntaresPromise/gifts).



> One of multiple shorts I'm doing for followers on Tumblr at the moment! 
> 
> AntaresPromise sent the prompt of "accidentally famous" and I wanted to go a less obvious route with it.

Victor wakes to the growl of his phone vibrating itself across the nightstand. He cracks his eyes just wide enough to see and slaps at it, stopping it before it jolts itself right off the edge, then peers at the caller information.

He’s greeted by a familiar picture of Christophe, winking and blowing a kiss to the camera. 

The temptation to throw his phone is real, but it _could_ be important. Technically Chris is meant to be ensuing that Victor gets paid soon. He thumbs to accept the call and presses the phone to his ear.

“Morning,” he mutters. 

“I saw a picture of you on Facebook,” Chris says.

Silence stretches around them as Victor blinks up at his white ceiling, uncomprehending. “You woke me up for this? I hate to tell you, but there are lots of pictures of me on Facebook. You put some of them there.”

“No,” Chris says, sounding delighted. “They don’t know its you yet, but it is. You’ve gone viral.”

“What?”

Victor sits up abruptly and slips from the bed. The concrete floor is so cold it almost burns his feet, and he feels out his slippers with his toes before wrapping a blanket around his shoulders. Makkachin raises her head when he stands and leaps off the bed follow him into the living room. 

Where did he last see the computer? His desk is covered in crumpled tubes of oil paint and trays of watercolors, and the coffee table is dominated by his most recent canvas, still drying. He pauses to look at the work again.

It’s a mess. He’ll tell Chris to burn it.

The silvery corner of his laptop protrudes from beneath the canvas, and Victor pulls it out. He drops onto the sofa and opens up Facebook as Makka curls against his hip.

“What am I looking for here?” He asks Chris. “My own name?”

“No. The internet has dubbed you ‘Good-Looking Foreigner’.”

Typing that into the search bar brings up an extensive feed of posts and photos. Victor immediately spots the picture in question. It has tens of thousands of reactions piled up beneath it and hundreds of comments that he knows not to read.

He’s facing toward the photographer but staring past them into the distance. His chin rests on one hand, while the other is holding his favorite blue pencil to a sketch pad spread out in front of him. He’s clearly unaware that he’s being photographed, caught in a quiet moment with his lips parted and his hair spilling artlessly over half his face.

The scenery behind him is a blur of brown and black as his face is featured with intense clarity. It’s a lovely photo. It’s also incredibly disorienting. 

When was this taken? Nothing about it seems familiar. What little he can make out of the background looks nothing like the Starbucks by his apartment where he sometimes sketches. 

He scrolls further in the feed, past comments declaring he’s “not that good-looking” and news stories in a vast array of languages. It seems the internet has already outed the photographer.

The interview is in Japanese, so Victor can’t parse the words, but Yuuri Katsuki looks startled behind his thick, blue-framed glasses, flushed and stammering in his responses. He’s clearly overwhelmed by the sudden flurry of attention. Victor can sympathize. 

It does help put the photo in context, though. Victor had only been in Japan a few days - a brief stop on a whirlwind tour in search of inspiration. He’d come up empty, but that explains why the scenery around him is unfamiliar.

Curious, he opens a new tab and types the photographer’s name into Google. A portfolio page pops up, and he clicks on it.

He expected the photos to be good, given the quality of the first one, but finds himself sucking in a breath as he scrolls through the display - sparkling midnight cityscapes, soft lavender mountains framing wandering deer, and ragged-eared stray cats squinting on garden walls dominate the portfolio. None of the pictures are of people, not even in the background.

He clicks back to the original photo of himself. It feels narcissistic to stare at his own face, but the photographer’s talent has brought out details he’d never notice from a simple mirror. Through this stranger’s lens, Victor is vulnerable in miniscule - the supple shadows on his skin, the peach and white of his fingernails, the smudge of graphite highlighting his cheekbone. 

“Well, what do you think?” Chris asks. Victor jumps. He’d forgotten Chris was still on the phone, waiting for Victor’s response. “The internet will find you eventually, but we can get ahead of it, maybe use this to market your art. How should we handle it?”

He clicks the artist bio link on the portfolio page. Yuuri Katsuki’s self-portrait is captured in a mirror reflection, a mess of dark hair and the edge of a clean-shaven cheek, mostly obscured by the bulk of his camera.

Victor surprises himself when he replies. “I want to meet him,” he tells Chris. “I need to talk to Yuuri Katsuki.”


End file.
